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Apple Does 1 Thing Other Companies Don't Do

This morning I got up a little early to set up my new Macbook Pro 15 inch notebook computer with Retina Display. I also bought the portable USB SuperDrive because the Macbook no longer comes with a DVD or CD player, to make things lighter, or people use thumb drives more I guess.

As I was unwrapping it I noticed something absolutely amazing…

The shrink-wrap was perfect.

I was so amazed I took two pictures with my iPhone 5. It seemed a shame to open it.

Apple does 1 thing that no other companies do... it takes time to make sure the packaging is perfect, to the tiniest details, even the shrink-wrapping, every time. Notice the seam of the shrink-wrapping...

The clear plastic seam was exactly even around the center of the box. And so was the shrink wrap on the USB SuperDrive box; even the shrink wrap on the box of an accessory is perfect. There weren’t any shrink-wrap wrinkles either on the corners of the box where some lazy employee didn’t bother taking the time with a hot air gun to shrink them out.

I always use those little wrinkles at the corner of the package to grab so I can rip the shrink wrap off of a box. There weren’t any. How do I even open it? Every other company on the planet has wrinkles.

Steve Jobs cared. And now Apple employees deeply care. Or probably, Apple has automated the process so it is perfect every time…

Every time.

Do you know how hard that is to do? I do. And why in the world would somebody be so anal-retentive that even the shrink wrap around the box was impressively perfect?

Because maybe it matters.

It mattered to Steve Jobs, it matters to Apple. They are the number one valued company in the world. Are these little tiny details related to their value in the marketplace?

I think so.

I remember I was the Marketing Director at Infobases, Inc., an electronic publishing company that was originally started by Paul Allen and Dan Taggart. We sold one of the first scriptures on computer software packages. We eventually tripled sales. Paul is now my friend who later helped found Ancestry.comAncestry.com, MyFamily.com, and Family Link. I just spoke with him the other day.

Back then I was in charge of the marketing strategy and the look and feel of the products, the packaging, the overall experience. Most of my other jobs have been in sales, but that time in marketing was incredibly valuable.

I remember one day I noticed that the manager of the packaging team was shrink-wrapping a pallet of software packages. He had this shrink-wrap sealing machine that would seal three edges around a box with heat. It was always uneven. But if you took a little extra time with the heat gun you could shrink the plastic with just the right tension so the seam would stay even in the center of the box.

He didn’t.

He shrunk that plastic as fast as he could. There were even black char marks occasionally where he melted a big lump in the corner. So what. It was just shrink-wrap.

He wanted to get finished. He didn’t care. It drove me nuts. It looked terrible. We had gone to incredible effort, hired a great designer by the name of Mark Meservy to carefully design wonderful packaging, and the shrink-wrap made us look like we didn’t give a darn.

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Another insightful article… thanks Ken. You’ve highlighted one of the real challenges of leadership, that being to craft a balance between setting and holding people to standards and teaching and coaching.

I disagree. Packaging as a function. It should be designed as perfectly as possible to fulfill that function. If you can do it elegantly without making the packaging dysfunctional then that should be done. Packaging should be uniform and frustration-free. As you mentioned, there is no way to get the shrinkwrap off without gouging the box. The box should be shippable. Double boxing is a waste.

When I bought my HP all-in-one, all of the batteries were installed in the box had a single round fold-over that will least with a pulltab. There were pulltabs and all of the wireless parts that had batteries. The first thing you saw was a large colored poster with suggestions as to the best order to pull the various tabs, plug what needed to be plugged in, and turn it on.

I recently had to use garden shears on a point-and-shoot camera plastic clamshell from Costco.

You’re correct that packaging is important. That you would seize upon shrinkwrap as the pinnacle of human innovation is laughable.

Everybody who gets into business cares about ROI, but as your article shows Steve Jobs was just as concerned about COI Care of Investment. Before he died he must have gone to great lengths to document his expectations for each department and post in his company. But the only thing that can’t be mass produced or proceduralized is genius.

I love the concept of COI, thanks for sharing that, and you are right about the power of genius, though it can’t be mass produced or proceduralized, it tends to be really good at producing procedure and mass production that is extremely high quality. Ken

I completely agree with your take on the attention to detail that Apple puts in. I recently bought a MacBook Air myself and was amazed when I went to open it. It almost felt like a crime mess with the packaging. I would even take it further to say that they make sure there are no labels, skus, or sale stickers on their products as well to keep in line with their aesthetic style. I guess some people just don’t realize that even though we won’t admit it, a lot of us pay a premium for a product sometimes just because of how it is presented to us.